He stirred resdessly. Sleep was far away. The wind was picking up, and the Moon was disappearing into a growing mass of cloud. He wondered if it was going to rain, after all. There were sounds in the brush all around him—
Krake froze, bolt upright, listening.
Not all those sounds were the wind! He fumbled in his pack for his flashlamp and turned it on, looking toward the stirrings in the brush.
Two figures were coming out of the woods along the stream, and one of them was certainly not human.
Krake listened intendy, ready for whatever might be coming. They said there wasn't any crime any more on Earth, but he had never believed that . . . certainly did not want to risk having one of those rare crimes happen to him. . . .
"Captain Krake?" It was the girl's voice, the one he had met along the road. "Captain Krake? It's me, Moon Bunderan. Will you help us, please?"
The Taur was deep in meditation, paying no attention to the talk of the humans. Krake crouched on one side of his little campfire, staring across the flames at the girl who looked so much like the woman he had left behind so long ago. He was shaking his head in astonishment at what she was asking. "But I can't take you anywhere, Moon," he said. "Where could we go? I have no home here on Earth. You certainly don't want to go with me on my ship, do you?"
"I do! do! Please take us anywhere where Thrayl will be safe," she begged.
He grimaced, half amused at her obstinate assurance, much more than half determined to save her from a serious mistake. "You wouldn't say that if you knew what it was like in a waveship, Moon. It's terribly lonesome. There'd just be me and my crew—no," he said emphatically, to keep her from arguing, "that's out of the question."
"Then take me to the orbit station with you!"
He said reasonably, "That's no good, either. The Turtles won't let you stay on their orbiter, Moon. Even if you got there, they'll just notify your parents, and then they'll come after you. And I won't be staying there myself; I'm going up to my ship as soon as my crew's ready, and then—off. Somewhere. Wherever there's a job for me."
"But they'll hurt Thrayl," she sobbed.
"You told me yourself that he doesn't mind—"
"I do! I mind terribly."
He sighed. Had there ever been a time when he could talk easily to a young woman? If so, that time was long gone. He did his best: "You don't know what you're asking, Moon. Are you prepared to leave your family permanently? Once you get in a starship you've left everybody you know on Earth forever."
She looked puzzled in the light of the fire. "Forever? But can't I come back to Earth?"
"To Earth, yes," he said bitterly. "I've just done that. But it's not the same Earth you come back to, Moon. Time dilation makes sure of that."
"I know all that, and I don't care! They don't need me any more. My brothers will stay on the ranch, that's the only thing they really care about—except going into town to look for girls. And I'm Thrayl's only friend. If I don't save him, who will?"
The girl thought for a moment, then added honesdy, "I don't want to stay here anyway. I want a bigger life than this, Captain Krake."
"Bigger how?"
"I don't know that, exactly," she admitted. "I just know that it's time for me to go."
He gazed at her helplessly. He could see nothing but difficulties, though he found himself longing to help. "I guess," he said at last, "I might be able to figure out a way to take you as far as the Turtle compound at Kansas City—"
"Oh, yes! Thank you! That would be wonderful!" At least for a beginning, Moon added to herself.
He gave her a suspicious look. "But I don't see how we could really get away even with that, because we can't take commercial air transportation," he pointed out. "If your family knows you've run off, they'll have reported it. The authorities will be watching for you and Thrayl."
"There must be some other way!"
"I don't know of any."
"Sure you do. Your car." She pointed triumphantly to the three-wheeler pulled up under the trees. "We could drive the car to this space ladder."
Krake stared at the huge Taur. Even squatting on the ground in his "listening to the songs" posture, he was almost as tall as Krake himself. "What, the three of us in that little thing? Including him ? It would take us days to get there if we drove!"
She said sturdily, "That's no problem. I can drive, too, so we can spell each other. Go straight through. And Thrayl can curl up in the back—we could cover him with your blankets, maybe."
"My camping gear has to go in the back!"
But Krake knew it was a losing argument for, when push came to shove, he could not resist those eyes. And what, he asked himself, were a tent and some odds and ends worth, after all? Why not just abandon them here, forfeiting the deposits? The money didn't matter.
And as to the things themselves, he would never need them again. Not in space. Not at all, unless he ever returned permanently to Earth . . . and Francis Krake had long decided that that he would never do.
The Earth singer sang on, trapped in his error, unable to sing the truth that even the error revealed:
"You remember our last class, I hope. In it we said that we are going to divide the history of the universe—our own personal universe, that is, the one we can experience, at least in theory—like the history of the human race, into three eras: Modern, Ancient and Prehistoric. We've already dealt with the modern era, which is to say the part beginning one second after the Big Bang.
"Now let's look at Ancient History. Don't get hung up on proportions, though. In human terms, Ancient History goes back several times as far as modern. That isn't true of the ancient history of our universe. It lasted only a little less than that one second.
"Even so, an awful lot of things happened in that second.
We can divide even the Ancient History of the universe into several eras. Ancient History starts at ten to the minus-43d power seconds, and the first part of it is the Grand Unified Theory, or GUT, Era. That goes from ten to the minus 43 to ten to the minus 37 seconds, which is to say that it lasts altogether for a little less than 1 divided by 10,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 seconds—that is, it is just under one ondecillionth of a second.
"That doesn't sound like much. Well, it wasn't. But it was enough to set the foundations for the Grand Unified Theory, and that's quite a lot.
"After the GUT era, things happened a little slower. Then we have the era when the hadrons begin to form—that runs to about a millionth of a second, which doesn't sound like much, either, but it's a lot more than an ondecillionth—and then the considerably longer era when the leptons begin to form, which uses up the rest of that first second of Ancient History. That's not too interesting, either.
"It is the GUT era, and the time before it, where the big events happen.
"The GUT era of ancient universal history is a time of very high energies and consequently of very heavy particles. It is also the time when space itself can be said to begin to exist.
"Now, some of you may be raising an eyebrow at that. You may have some dumb questions stirring around in your mind. For instance, how can there be anything before there was space for it to be in, you may ask.
"Let me show you why that's a dumb question. Spacc implies some kind of structure. The smallest structures we know, and we think probably the smallest structures that exist, are at the Planck length, which is somewhere around 10 to the minus 35th meters.